Word: alarms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seoul's 600,000-man armed forces were promptly placed on full alert, and tanks took up positions at major government buildings. The Carter Administration expressed alarm over the developments. "It's a power play, the three stars against the four stars," said a high official. U.S. Ambassador William Gleysteen Jr. was ordered to convey a tough message to the Korean brass: Keep your hands off politics or risk a grave rupture in U.S. relations. For the time being, at least, that warning held. President Choi, for his part, sought to show that his political timetable was unchanged...
...Apprehensive outcries wail forth from broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, posters, labels, environmental journals, medical tracts, Government reports, even books. One of the books is a brand-new broadside by Dr. Charles T. McGee, a clinical ecologist of Alamo, Calif., who is quoted above. His 220-page polemic issues a general alarm about multifarious dangers that lurk in every nook and cranny of contemporary civilization. Even fluorescent lighting, he says, may, in some weird way, weaken the muscles. The book, billed as a "crash course in protecting your health from hidden hazards of modern living," is entitled How to Survive Modern Technology...
...times are fraught with real hazards, and no sensible person would sniff at prudent precautions. Still, it is hard not to shudder at the sheer volume of disquieting cautions, at the constancy, variety and intensity of the fearful clamor. Indeed, one may reasonably wonder whether the very climate of alarm itself has not become a hazard to health and serenity. Everybody's psyche now takes a drubbing day in and out from the concatenations of danger. An American can scarcely make a move nowadays without being pushed into a state of alert...
...hangdog pathos is enough to provoke wistful dreams of returning to the vanished day when a person was guided only by folk wisdom: an apple a day would keep the doctor away. But there is no going back. Today the apple must be checked for sprayed-on toxins. The alarm system is here to stay. It would be foolhardy as well as foolish to suggest that it be shut down; it is, in truth, indispensable for guiding those who wish guidance. What is needed is a strategy for getting through life passably happy de spite all the ominous background chatter...
Cynics may shrug at doctrines of willful optimism. Still Americans have a right to be optimistic. After all, they are living longer and longer. Perhaps each new alarm should be couplet with a dire warning that life is likely to go on despite all the dangers...